TOKYO
- As expected, Japan's cabinet extended the deployment
of up to 600 troops in Iraq for another year, though
they are largely sequestered in their high-tech desert
fortress. This move was billed as unflinching support
for its ally the United States and a helping hand to
war-torn Iraq. A new defense policy unfurled the
following day, however, showed that after a
half-century, Tokyo's military and global aspirations,
like a once-slumbering giant, may just be starting to
stir.

The cabinet, in endorsing the new
five-year defense policy, also cracked the door open
just a bit, lifting a decades-old arms-export ban,
citing as justification an "immediate" need for a joint
missile-defense system with the United States. Only
certain exports to the US will be allowed - the general
ban was not lifted. And for the first time, the
defense-policy outline singled out other nations as
security concerns - understandably North Korea, but also
China.

To fend off a ballistic attack, Japan has
been working with the United States since 1999 on a new
missile-defense system. To facilitate developing and
deploying the system, which includes Aegis-equipped
destroyers and surface-to-air advanced US Patriot
missiles, a self-imposed weapons-export ban will be
eased to allow related sales - only to the United
States.

The revised special law extended a
December 14 deadline on Japan's largest overseas
military operation since World War II. The initial law
was drafted so that the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) could
skirt provisions of the nation's war-renouncing
constitution in order to provide humanitarian assistance
in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah. It is valid as
long as the area remains a non-combat zone.

With
subsequent approval the next day, however, of the more
far-reaching National Defense Program Outline, such
special legislation - deployment extension by the
cabinet - was made obsolete, and then some. Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi's cabinet gave the state
authorization to dispatch SDF troops anywhere from East
Asia to the Middle East for national "security".

Maintaining that "Samawah is not a combat zone",
Koizumi told the nation in a televised statement that
"we must not give into terror". He insisted that for
Iraq to be rebuilt, "the Self-Defense Forces are
needed". He also later warned that for the "future of
our neighboring areas, we have to keep supporting the
United States when it faces hardship in Iraq".

The prime minister has spent a wealth of
political capital on arguing that the Samawah area is a
non-combat zone in response to the opposition within the
government and what media polls say is nearly two-thirds
of the public, with a history of post-World War II
pacifism, disapproving of the deployment. While "combat
zone" remains ill-defined by the cabinet, that Samawah
is not one has become increasingly hard to sell.

Since Japan's troops first scurried for cover
when three mortar shells exploded outside their camp in
early April, the warning shots have continued. So far,
there have been no casualties. But the warnings are
ringing louder. The seventh came in October as a defused
rocket breached the compound parameter - a day after the
US-flag-draped body of a decapitated Japanese citizen
turned up in Baghdad. Most recently, it was the bombing
of a nearby shop just hours after Defense Agency chief
Yoshinori Ono scuttled through for a very brief show of
Samawah "stability" on December 5. With the Dutch troops
responsible for security in the area pulling out in
April, Tokyo reportedly got word from Britain that its
troops would take over the job. But the SDF may have to
do what a Dutch official visiting Tokyo in November
suggested: fend for themselves.

With neither a
mandate for nor experience in combat, the lightly armed
Self-Defense Forces' work in Iraq has been hampered.
Several times in the past year troops have holed up in
their base camp for safety. Reports of completed
projects include purifying several tons of drinking
water and training and employing a few hundred Iraqis to
rebuild schools and other facilities. But such reports,
like those of local Iraqis frustrated over too few
projects, have been sketchy. Citing security reasons,
the Defense Agency imposed a news "brownout" on the
mission, reinforcing the local media's tendency to take
state press briefings at face value. That has generated
criticism, even from some in Koizumi's own Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP), and a call to write off the
deployment as an unnecessary risk of troops' lives for
what they call the unabashed kowtowing to Washington.

"They went there claiming that they will
contribute to reconstruction, but they have hardly been
able to get the work done," lawmaker Koichi Kato told
the New York Times last month. "There is no reason for
them to be there ... The good image that took Japan
60-100 years to build in the Arab world has crumbled
over the past year or so."

If keeping Japan's
troops in Iraq is more about winning favors from
Washington than reconstruction as Koizumi critics
suggest, then the quid pro quo is elusive. The initial
deployment of troops from the world's No 2 economic
power was a welcome, albeit symbolic, addition to
Washington's "coalition of the willing". Nearly two
years into the conflict, however, major identifiable
reconstruction, effective elections and a timely
military withdrawal have not taken place. George W
Bush's administration will be hard pressed to appreciate
fully what remains mere symbolic deployment by Japan,
said Ed Lincoln, an analyst for the Washington, DC-based
Council on Foreign Relations.

"I have attended
many discussions of Iraq policy in Washington over the
past several years," Lincoln said. "Not once has the
word 'Japan' been uttered in these discussions, which is
an indication of just how irrelevant the Japanese are
for what is occurring in Iraq."

Lincoln argued
that if Tokyo's rationale for sending troops to Iraq is
to win favor from the United States, it is an "invalid"
one. He pointed out that Washington was already
concerned about the North Korean nuclear issue,
continues to snub Japan's pleas to be more flexible in
negotiating with the reclusive state and, while showing
tacit support, has done "nothing to support the Japanese
on their favorite issue - the abductees [Japanese
citizens captured and held by North Korea over the
years] and their families".

If toeing the Bush
line on the "terror war" does not provide an adequate
motive for redefining Japan's military role in the
world, then it may at least offer sufficient
justification for it.

Japan's latest defense
outline stipulates that the SDF must rise to the
challenge of two new threats - ballistic missiles and
terrorism. Previous outlines were diplomatically vague
in spelling out the minimum needed to fend off unnamed
invaders during and immediately after the Cold War. They
implied that defense should be limited to safeguarding
Japan's borders, and that's how most Japanese had
understood the previous policies.

The 2004
outline, however, states that North Korea's military
activities pose "an important factor for instability".
It also notes that "there is a need to pay attention to
future trends" in China with regard to the advancement
of its military and its aggressive maritime activities -
an obvious swipe at a nuclear submarine and other
vessels that have recently violated Japan's maritime
boundaries.

It describes all of East Asia as "an
extremely important region for our security". And it
calls for proactive military actions to "improve the
international security environment and to ensure that
threats do not reach our nation". The days of hunkering
down out of harm's way, awaiting a chance to rebuild
schools in Iraq, appear to be numbered for Japan's
Self-Defense Forces.

Defense chief Ono announced
plans to submit to the Diet (parliament) in January
proposed legislative changes that would give the
military new and more muscular mandates, including
expediting responses to a missile attack. Japan's
current system for attack responses, for example, would
take much longer than the 10 minutes needed for a North
Korean missile to reach its shores after a launch is
detected. Speeding up the process raises the thorny
issue of what, and how, civilian branches of government
will remain in the decision-making loop. Not giving the
military carte blanche in assessing and
responding to perceived attacks is of paramount
importance to the Japanese public, not to mention
neighboring nations, given Japan's wartime militarism,
invasions, occupations and brutality.

Since
1999, Japan and the US have been working on joint
development of a new missile-defense system, and many
observers consider it a response to the threat from
North Korea. To facilitate building and deploying the
system, including Aegis-equipped destroyers and
surface-to-air missiles, Japan's time-honored and
self-imposed ban on sale of weapons will be relaxed; now
missile-defense-related sales will be permitted, but
only to the US.

What the outline did not say
about hotly disputed missile defense, however, and the
arms- and weapons-technology ban is perhaps more
telling. Hawkish LDP members had pushed plans to
research long-range precision missiles under the guise
of the defense system. The party's junior coalition
partner, New Komeito, however, shot that down just days
before the defense outline was signed. Proponents had
said the 300-kilometer-range missiles would only have
been intended and used to defend Japan's distant
islands, but critics balked that they would also allow
targeting of enemy bases, counter to Japan's waning
defense-only policy.

The domestic defense
industry has been lobbying the LDP long and hard to
allow exports of any weapons and related technology to
most nations. The senior coalition party had advocated
letting companies develop and sell such "defensive"
equipment as night-vision goggles and flak jackets, at
which New Komeito also balked.

At least one
equipment supplier that has long been at the beck and
call of a single, albeit generous, customer - the
Japanese government - sees light at the end of the
tunnel. For ShinMaywa Industries Ltd, which has supplied
the Self-Defense Forces with US-1A amphibian
search-and-rescue planes since 1974, the world is its
oyster. While the government decreed the unarmed
aircraft to be exempt from the arms ban in 1975,
ShinMaywa has refrained from marketing them
internationally because of state sentiments favoring the
principle of the arms ban. But times have changed. The
company is now mulling over inquiries from Britain,
France and Greece as well as the United States.

If the weapons-export ban will continue to apply
to other non-combat technologies that might be used as
weapons or in combat, such as night-vision goggles, only
time will tell. Its easing, however, will placate local
industry heavies such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. It
helped research and develop a special detachable nose
cone for the joint-defense system's interceptor missiles
but it was barred from the real bread and butter -
manufacturing them, according to the daily Asahi
Shimbun. That is, until Japan's new defense outline made
an exception to the export ban for its missile-defense
program with the United States.